


she's a four leaf clover but i won't press my luck

by mass_hipgnosis



Series: websterverse [2]
Category: Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), Thor (Movies)
Genre: F/M, IronTaser - Freeform, SHIP DARCY WITH ALL THE THINGS, five +1 things
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-07
Updated: 2014-06-14
Packaged: 2018-02-03 19:41:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 2,944
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1755423
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mass_hipgnosis/pseuds/mass_hipgnosis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Five times Darcy Lewis gets her way with Tony Stark, and one time Tony wins out (or does he?).</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. One - Eating

**One - Eating**

“See this sandwich? I need you to eat it.” The declaration was accompanied by a plate with said sandwich being shoved helpfully directly in his line of sight.

“I don't like being handed things,” Tony replied, mostly just to be difficult. The whole 'I don't like to be handed things' schtick started as a way to troll one of his pre-Pepper personal assistants, and he'd continued with it because it never stopped being funny to see that baffled pause, the unasked question, _'Well what do I do with this, then?'_

But she just shrugged like it was far from the weirdest thing she'd ever heard. Which-she worked for Foster (at least for now), so it probably really wasn't. “Fine, I'll hold it, you eat,” she declared, extending half the sandwich so it was almost at his lips.

“Bossy,” he chided her, taking a bite.

“I would protest, but it's true,” she replied, not looking terribly bothered.

“I could get a lot more work done if all my assistants were willing to hand-feed me,” Tony decided when he'd finished the sandwich and was being fed fresh-from-the-greenmarket summer berries while he worked on rewiring one of the flight stabilizers for the Mark 52.

 _“Still_ not your assistant. But I could get a lot more work done if _Jane_ was willing to be hand-fed. I tried it once-she bites.”

“For someone who's 'not my assistant,' you're down here a lot.”

Darcy shrugged again. He loved it when she shrugged, especially on the days when she thought wearing a baggy sweater meant she didn't need to wear a bra (sweater days were the _best)._ “I'm on SI's payroll the same as Jane,” she pointed out. “And I'm not a scientist, my job is basically making sure she eats and sleeps and showers and does her paperwork. And that's not really a full-time gig.”

“Do not make me do paperwork,” he warned her.

“I very much doubt that I could. My Jane tactics wouldn't work on you. My Bruce tactics would also probably not work on you.”

“What are your Bruce tactics?” Tony asked, curious.

“Generally I just have to remind him of stuff, he's very reasonable for a mad scientist. Once I threatened to flash him if he didn't eat and go to bed, I really don't think that would work for you.”

He eyed her chest. “It might work as a bribe.”

“I'd have to _actually do it_ for it to work as a bribe, whereas the beauty of an effective threat is you only have to threaten it.”

“Touché.”

“Speaking of threats and bribes, I have to go deal with the feeding and watering of the lesser-spotted astrophysicist. See ya.” 

It wasn't until she was already gone that Tony realized she'd gotten him to eat two sandwiches, carrot sticks dipped in hummus and almost a cup of fruit. If she kept it up he'd have to have all his pants let out.


	2. Two - Sleeping

**Two – Sleeping**

“Tony. Tony. Tonytonytony.”

“Busy, jailbait,” he grunted.

“I'm twenty-two years old, tin man, I am legal for _everything.”_ She poked him in the ribs. “It's time for bed.”

“I'm working.”

“JARVIS, how long has your bossman here been awake?”

_“Sir has been awake and working for forty-three hours.”_

“I've done more on less,” Tony responded absently. “I'm fine.”

“Yeah, not buying it. A family of four could fly to Europe with the bags under your eyes, champ. Plus you've burned yourself twice with that soldering iron just since I've been standing here.”

“I'm not five,” Tony protested, well aware that he sounded all of three.

“How about I make you a deal. We play best of three, Rock Paper Scissors Lizard Spock, and if you win, I'll leave you here to suffer in the name of scientific advancement. But if I win, you have to come upstairs and watch the Bugs Bunny & Tweety Show marathon with me.”

“Rock Paper Scissors Lizard Spock?” Tony echoed, puzzled.

She gaped at him. “Are you serious right now?! Okay, here's how it works. Scissors cut paper, paper covers rock, rock crushes lizard, lizard poisons Spock, Spock smashes scissors, scissors decapitate lizard, lizard eats paper, paper disproves Spock, Spock vaporizes rock, and rock crushes scissors.”

Tony ran through that a few times until he was sure he had a solid strategy. “Okay, got it. Prepare to have your ass kicked.”

“I think I'm as prepared as I need to be,” she replied wryly.

_(Two Minutes Later)_

“You cheated. You are a cheating cheater who cheats!”

“It's impossible to cheat at Rock Paper Scissors Lizard Spock unless you're psychic. That's what makes it _awesome._ Wait, _am_ I psychic? Does that mean I'm the seventh Avenger?” She gasped sarcastically. Tony didn't even know it was _possible_ to gasp sarcastically. “My superhero name could be Mesmerina!”

“One, you're not psychic, two, you are too close to supervillainy for Captain Tightpants to let you on the team even if you were, and three, stop ripping off the Simpsons.”

“I can't believe you got that reference. Tony Stark, secret _enormous dork.”_

He leered cheerfully. “More like secret enormous di-”

She slapped her hand over his mouth and said, “It's not a secret, Tony. Everybody knows. Your sex tape has more hits than a Top 40 radio station.”

“Why, Miss Lewis, I do declare! Did you peek at my sex tape?”

She scoffed. “Isn't that what you wanted, for the whole world to look? Stark Industries' pack of rabid lawyers could have that thing wiped off the face of the internet in a hot second. Clearly the only reason they haven't is because you won't let them off the leash.”

 _Ooops, caught._ Tony shrugged. “It would actually take a lot of time, money and litigation to get it taken down, and there's no possible way to eliminate all copies, which means it's almost guaranteed to end up online again at some point. Why start a fight I can't win?”

“That's....very reasonable. _Too_ reasonable. JARVIS, scan him. I suspect either a pod person or some kind of Stepford brainwashing.”

“Ha ha, you're hilarious,” Tony deadpanned.

“C'mon, pornstar. It's time for cartoons.”

Tony allowed her to lead him to the elevator, but added, “Just for the record, I want it known that I _am_ aware 'cartoons' is actually code for 'trick Tony into falling asleep on the couch.'”

She snapped her fingers. “Rats! My dastardly scheme has been discovered!” A pause. “Does that mean you don't want a drunken hot cocoa?”

“Of course I want a drunken hot cocoa, I'm pretty sure I haven't suffered a recent fun-ectomy, short stuff.”

“Are you _really_ pretty sure? Because you haven't exactly been the life of the party, holed up in your workshop with the greatest hits of the ACME Catalog, Wile E.”

Tony could practically feel his eyes light up. “Oooh, giant slingshot!” He turned to go back to his workshop.

And was promptly stopped by Darcy's hand fisted in the waistband of his jeans. “No.”

“C'mon, five minutes!”

“Nem.”

“Just let me draw up the schematics really quick!” Tony argued, but he wasn't really resisting as hard as he could be as she dragged him along.

“Nej.” 

“I'm not actually a pull-toy. Leggo.” It wasn't genuine resistance so much as Tony wanting to know how many languages she could say no to him in. Fifteen was his previous personal best.

“Ochi.” 

“I'll be back once the hot cocoa's ready.”

“Nein.” 

“I still don't understand your baffling and traitorous affection for Apple products, but...pretty please with a new iPod on top?”

“Mhai.” (He secretly loved it that she couldn't be bribed with material goods. Nearly every woman he'd ever interacted with had wanted something from him, except Pepper, who had turned out not to want anything from him.) 

“I'll be your best frie-end,” he wheedled, grade-school style. “Just give me five, okay, no, ten, all right, fifteen! Fifteen more minutes in the workshop!”

“Não.”

He dragged his feet to make his sneakers squeak on the hallway floor, windmilled his arms dramatically each time she pulled him backward, exaggerating the force which was really nothing more than a determined tug. “You're _mean!”_ he whined gleefully. “Bossy and mean and fired!”

He could hear the grin in her voice when she said, “Nakheyr.” Because they both knew it was a lie.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The languages Darcy says 'no' in are, in order: Hungarian, Danish, Greek, German, Cantonese, Portugese and Farsi. 
> 
> It is my fanon belief that Tony would refuse to watch a show where the mechanical engineer is the butt of most of the jokes. Therefore, he would be unfamiliar with Rock Paper Scissors Lizard Spock.


	3. Three – Music

**Three – Music**

“Hey, JARVIS, can we get something a little less Greatest Hits of Mullet Rock in here?”

_“Certainly, Miss Darcy, what did you have in mind?”_

“Hey, whoa, what is this, a conspiracy? Don't touch the tunes, Tits.”

She stuck her tongue out at him and said, “Shut your pie hole, Walter Bishop. Why don't you play something _you_ like, J?”

“Betrayal!” Tony cried. “Betrayal and conspiracy!” He knew JARVIS listened to music...Tony had coded him to be capable of learning and growth, just like a biological human, and that meant curiousity too. “What are you doing in here anyway, you don't even work for me. DUM-E, Security Breach!”

DUM-E whirred awake and unplugged from his charging station, scanning the room and finding only Darcy, seated at an unused workbench and filling out forms. His armature drooped, and he turned to Tony, as if to say, _You woke me up for this?_

“Oh, DUM-E, it's okay sweetheart, Tony's just being a sore loser. Go ahead and hit it, J.”

And Tony couldn't really bring himself to protest, even though it was his lab, dammit, and he didn't let random girls mess with his music. He knew perfectly well that JARVIS could run multiple processes simultaneously, so that he could be monitoring in both the Malibu house and Stark Tower, conversing with multiple people, compiling code, and running the Iron Man suit, with plenty of processor power left over to indulge his own interests. But Tony'd never asked JARVIS to share his interests; it had never occurred to him. And that made him feel like an asshole.

The opening bars of Glitch Mob's _We Can Make The World Stop_ blasted out of the speakers, and Darcy smirked at him, then licked her finger and chalked up a point on an invisible scoreboard.

“Manipulative and _pushy,”_ he muttered, but it wasn't really a complaint.


	4. Four - Paperwork

**Four – Paperwork**

“Iron Man, can I have your autograph?”

Tony looked up from the schematics he was working on. “That's Foster's paperwork, you brought it down here,” he insisted, looking at the stack of forms like they might bite (stranger things had happened).

_“Jane_ doesn't have incident reports from the last Doombot soiree in Central Park that are two weeks late.”

“You said you couldn't make me do paperwork,” he pointed out.

“And I'm not. I filled it out _for_ you, which I'm not supposed to do, so no ratting me out to Commandant Spangler. All you have to do is give it a quick look-see to make sure it's correct and sign it.”

“Uh-uh, reading things and signing them sounds an awful lot like doing paperwork. I'm pretty sure I used to do a lot of reading things and signing them before I decided being a CEO was bogus.”

“Tony.”

“Yes?”

“Either you sign this, or I beat you over the head with it.”

Tony considered that. The papers were on a clipboard, with a big metal clip at the top. She was probably kidding, but on the off chance she wasn't.... “Where's a pen?”


	5. Five - Pepper

**Five – Pepper**

“I want to send something to Pepper. But I thought you should look at it first, because you might not want me to. It's not even really my business, except in the way that you're working yourself to death.”

Tony looked up, and he tried to hide the awful hope he felt but he didn't think he was doing a terribly good job.

“It's not gonna make her take you back...it's just a book, you can't expect miracles. But I thought it might help remind her that you were friends for like ten years before stupid feelings got in the way. Because – and I speak from experience here - the hands down suckiest part of breaking up with someone who was your friend first is how you're not friends anymore after.”

“All right, let's see this miracle book.”

“It's _not_ a miracle book, are you sure you're a genius?” she taunted, but the words lacked her usual bite, and she still handed it over when he made grabby hands.

He snorted about halfway through. “Roombas, huh? Is that a hint?”

Darcy shrugged, which did wonderful things to her chest. If Tony thought he could get away with it, he would pay her to just shrug all the time in his line of sight. “I always wanted one of those little robot dogs. But I think DUM-E would be sad if I had a new favorite.”

DUM-E beep-chirruped from the corner, as if to confirm it.

Tony closed the book. “Yes, all right, send it. It'll make her laugh, at least. Meddler.”

“You say that like I should be insulted or something. Meddling is just social engineering. Besides, it's no fun bugging you when you're walking around all sadface.”

“And yet you do it anyway.”

“Okay, well, _no_ fun might be a bit of an exaggeration. You give good snark. But just imagine all the fun we can have when you're in top form! I'm gonna mail this-” she held up the book- “and you should go upstairs, because my other reason for coming down here was that Bruce wanted to show you some sexy new math. I have no idea what it's math _for,_ but he seemed very excited.”

And it was only at that point that Tony realized Darcy had been subtly and not-so-subtly 'engineering' his days since he met her to ensure he had little, if any, time alone to brood about his breakup with Pepper. It had been almost a month; he wasn't usually so slow on the uptake.

Maybe she was right about all the supergeniuses she knew being life-stupid. Not that he'd ever tell her.


	6. +1 - Work

**+1 – Work**

“Hot Lips! Help!” Tony called as JARVIS let Darcy into his workshop.

“Hot Lips? I am not a nurse! Or a blond.”

“No, but you're bossy and stacked.”

He could see she was debating whether to argue further, but after a moment of consideration, she just smirked at him. “What's up, buttercup?”

“Does that make you Wesley?”

She rolled her eyes. “Sure.”

“I need another pair of hands.”

“Can do, where do you need them?” she asked, setting down the tray with his lunch.

“Here, just hold these wires out of the way while I solder.” Tony pointed to the multicolored coil of wiring in the leg piece of the Mark 34, and she pulled them aside. He soldered the isolated redundancy controls chip for the flight stabilizer in place. “Done.”

“Awesome, that means you can eat.”

“I'm not hungry.”

“You're never hungry, that's a thing that happens when you _don't eat._ Your body stops expecting it. You know who else has that? Starving children in Somalia. Where are we again? Remind me?”

“New York,” Tony said, because if he didn't respond she would pinch him.

“Right, and are we starving here? In the most advanced green skyscraper in the world? No? Eat your lunch.”

Tony took the cover off the tray. Croissant sandwiches, an apple, and... “What is this?”

“It's a cobb salad*.”

“It's rabbit food.”

“It's the size of your fist and it has chicken and bacon and cheese in it. If you can't manage to eat something that size that's garnished with _bacon_ I will make fun of you forever and tell Pepper on you.”

“You're a terrible assistant. Literally the worst, and my last assistant stabbed me in the neck.”

There was no response.

Tony frowned. “Isn't this the part where you tell me you don't work for me?”

“What are you talking about, I totally work for you,” Darcy replied.

“You do?”

“Pepper arranged it when she was here last week, look, I have cards and everything.” She pulled one out of her back pocket. It was a piece of clear plastic with a holographic A in one corner. The front read, in black block print, 

**DARCY LEWIS  
 **Avengers R &D  
 **Assistant and Point of Contact for  
 **Anthony Stark, PhD  
 **Bruce Banner, PhD, MD  
 **Jane Foster, PhD************

Darcy's work and cell numbers and her starknet e-mail address were listed in smaller print on the bottom edge. 

“You still have to share me with Bruce and Jane, and I'm basically just doing the same things I was before, possibly with bonus nagging, because now that it's official, people who are trying to get you to do stuff will know to go through me. But there's also what I call the fuck-off corollary, where you don't have to bother with people trying to get you to do _dumb_ stuff, because I'll tell them to go screw themselves before they even get to you.” 

“A gatekeeper, I like it. Will you _literally_ tell them to go screw themselves, because that would be awesome.” 

“I totally will, and JARVIS will even record it for you. I bet we can come up with an awesome drinking game to go with the footage.” 

“A drinking game?” 

“Oh yeah, you can make up drinking games for _anything,_ it doesn't just have to be a movie.” 

“Best. Assistant. Ever.” 

“I'm going to get JARVIS to play that on a loop the next time I have to hand you things and make you sign them.” 

And Tony groaned. Of course, now that it was official, she'd probably make him sign things _all the time._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *This is how we make people eat salad in my house. And if they don't eat it they get mocked while I eat their salad, because my cobb salad is fucking delicious.
> 
> So, the next part of the series is going to deal with Pepper's visit from Pepper's POV, and it will include The Book, and be set between chapters 5 and 6 of _she's a four leaf clover but i won't press my luck._ My question is, would you all prefer I come out with short chapters as I have them written, the way I did with this part, or just post it all as a one-shot when it's finished? It just keeps getting bigger and I'm not sure what to do  (*snicker* THAT'S WHAT **SHE** SAID).


End file.
